by Cathy Holton
Annie turned her attention back to the court, where Mel and Sara stood facing each other across the net. “If I’d known we were playing singles,” she said in a sulky voice, “I wouldn’t have come.” She stood there with her tennis skirt flaring over her hips like a parachute, feeling hot and sweaty and fat.
“Just three games,” Sara said. “Just long enough for me to whip Mel’s ass so we can get on to other things.”
“Hey, I’m trying to serve here,” Mel said. “Stop talking.”
“Who said you could serve first?”
“Sorry. We’ll spin it.”
“My mouth tastes like yellow,” Lola said unexpectedly.
Sara watched Mel intently. She waved her hand and said, “Go ahead. Serve.” She glanced over at Annie, but Annie was watching Lola with a strange expression on her face.
“Are you sure?” Mel asked.
“Just do it,” Sara said.
Mel bounced the ball slowly. She had a killer first serve, although after that she was just as likely to hit it into the net. She tossed the ball high and leaned back.
“Rosa’s aura is like a peacock feather,” Lola said to no one in particular.
Annie frowned. “Who’s Rosa?” she asked.
Mel froze with her arm stretched behind her head. The ball dropped harmlessly to the ground, bounced several times, and rolled against the fence. She slowly lowered her arms and sighed, tapping the toe of one shoe repeatedly with her racket. “Girls, I’m trying to serve here,” she said with exaggerated patience.
“Okay,” Lola said. She put her racket up in front of her face. “Sorry,” she said.
Palm fronds stirred lazily with the breeze. The sun beat down on their heads.
Mel bounced the ball and looked at Sara. “Ready?” she asked.
Sara got serious again. “Ready.”
Mel crouched down in position. She tossed the ball high overhead and leaned back into her serve. Everyone waited, watching quietly.
Lola said, “Mel, can I have a Twizzler?”
The ball dropped to the court. Sara put her hands on her knees and looked at her feet. Over on the bench, Lola began to giggle.
Sara won, two games to one, although they went to deuce every game. Mel flung her racket over the fence into a palmetto thicket and had to go in to retrieve it, and after that they played doubles again, Mel and Annie on one side of the net and Lola and Sara on the other. Lola was a good tennis player. She had the long, pretty strokes that denoted a privileged childhood spent in private tennis lessons. She was fine for the first few games, but after a while she stopped playing and stood there looking at the sky or staring at her racket as the ball whizzed by.
“Lola, are you all right?” Sara asked. She was leaning on her racket, trying to catch her breath. She’d just run across the court trying to hit one of Annie’s lobs while Lola stood at the net looking at her feet.
Lola was staring at the bottom of one shoe with a look of amazement on her face. “Look,” she said, holding her foot up so they could see it. “There’s a hole in my shoe.”
Sara was reminded of her earlier impression that Lola was putting them on. “Let’s take a water break,” she wheezed.
“Fine,” Mel said. “It’s our serve anyway.”
They went over to the bench and sat down. The sun had moved in the sky, and the shade cast by the palm had lengthened, so that now it was almost pleasant sitting there. Mel poured water over the back of her neck. Annie and Sara sipped their water bottles. Lola sat down and took her shoe off.
“Lola, what are you doing?” Mel asked. “We’re between games.” The score was three to two and they were ahead, so Mel had no intention of stopping now.
“I’ve got a hole in my shoe,” Lola said, holding it up.
“So what? Put it back on.”
“Okay.”
They watched Lola put her shoe back on. The courts were beginning to fill up again, as the late-afternoon sun died and the cool of evening began to glide across the landscape. Courts Sixteen and Seventeen were full, and everywhere now came the steady pleasant thock of tennis balls hitting racket strings. Annie stood watching the foursome on Court Sixteen play The perspiration she had worked up during the warm-up had long since dissipated. Mel was a maniac on the court—she poached balls left and right—and after a while Annie had been content to simply stand on the baseline and hit an occasional lob, a shot Mel steadfastly refused to use. With Lola focused, it had been an intense match, with them going to deuce for the first three games, but now that Lola had lost interest, Sara was having a hard time of it.
The women on Court Sixteen were probably in their sixties and seventies, and they played at a leisurely pace that Annie could relate to. She liked a slow, unhurried game, which probably helped explain her hips and those troublesome Jameson thighs. She wasn’t fat, but she was matronly, whereas Mel and Sara had somehow managed to hang on to their college figures and Lola seemed to be mysteriously regressing toward girlhood. Whatever heartbreak Lola was dealing with in her marriage, it hadn’t put a wrinkle in her face or a single dimple in her thighs, and there was something to be said for that.
Annie sighed and tugged her skirt down over her hips. She wondered what Paul Ballard would say if he could see her now. Would he recognize her if she passed him on the street with her white hair and Jameson thighs? Surely he would recognize the Jameson thighs. But no, when she’d known him her figure had been trim almost to the point of anorexia. She’d been unable to eat when she first met him, which was one of the ways she’d known she was falling in love: a complete cessation of all desires except for one, a general lack of hunger that gradually grew into troubling symptoms of nausea and malaise.
Watching the women on Court Sixteen, Annie tried to remember if she had ever lost her appetite when she first met Mitchell. But that was more than thirty years ago, shrouded in adolescent dreams and desires, and she couldn’t remember the specifics now. The mature Mitchell did not like skinny women. He liked his women to have what he fondly called “a little cushion.” Even now she had to be careful not to let him come up behind her when she was bent over cleaning a baseboard or scrubbing mildew off the bathtub grout.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Sara said, gently bumping Annie with her racket.
Annie flushed. “What?” she asked.
“I think Annie has a secret,” Mel said, leaning back with her bottle resting on her thigh. “I think there’s something Annie isn’t telling us.”
“Those women on Court Sixteen just went to deuce,” Annie said. Mel was right. Despite the little stories she told them about Mitchell, she knew how to keep a secret. She knew how to keep it safe. She made a place for it, a little nest under her heart. She carried it around inside her like an egg.
“She doesn’t want to tell us anything else because she’s afraid you’ll put it in one of your damn books,” Sara said.
“I don’t write about people I know,” Mel said.
“Sure you do.”
“I thought you didn’t read my books.”
“I never said that.”
“Yes, you did. You said you stopped reading my books because you got tired of seeing yourself as the villain.”
“Well, there is that.”
“And speaking of stories, you’re the only one who didn’t play the game on the beach. You didn’t think I was going to forget, did you? You’re the only one who didn’t tell us something about yourself that no one else knows.”
Annie plucked at the strings of her racket, glad to have the attention off of herself. “I doubt Sara has anything to confess.”
“We all have something to confess,” Mel said.
“But not Sara.”
Sara looked out at the shady court and said quietly, “I once withheld evidence in a child-abuse case. The mother was guilty as sin of other things, but not what she was being charged with, but I didn’t want the child returned to her. So I suppressed the evidence that might have cleared her and the ch
ild was placed in foster care.” She waited, as if daring anyone to say anything. She wasn’t even sure why she’d told them. She’d never told anyone before, not even Tom.
Mel stretched her legs out in front of her and looked at Sara with a curious expression. “So in other words, you played judge and jury.”
“Yes.”
“You have a bad habit of doing that.”
Sara said nothing, turning her head to watch the women on Court Sixteen. A pair of gulls hung motionless above them, their bright beady eyes glittering in the sunlight.
“Couldn’t you be disbarred for that?”
“Yes,” she said.
Lola stood up suddenly and walked off. “Where are you going?” Mel called. “We’re not finished yet.”
“I have to tinkle,” Lola said over her shoulder, waving at them with her racket. She walked with a jaunty step, the hem of her skirt flouncing and swaying gaily.
They watched her walk across the bridge and stroll up the narrow winding path between the courts. “Shouldn’t one of us go with her?” Sara said.
“She’s all right,” Mel said. “She can’t get lost between here and the clubhouse.”
Forty-five minutes later, Mel pulled her cell phone out of her bag to check the time. “Well, shit,” she said. “I guess we’re finished for the day.”
“Where do you think she is?” Sara asked, zipping her racket into her bag.
“Who knows.”
Annie, who’d finally succumbed to the heat and the boredom by dozing off, yawned and stood up slowly. She groaned and stretched her arms over her head. “I’m so sore,” she said. “I won’t be able to move tomorrow.”
“How can you be sore when you didn’t do anything?” Mel asked. She stood up and began to pack her gear.
“I can’t help it if you’re a poacher. I can’t help it if you hardly let me hit anything.”
“Hey, we were winning, weren’t we?”
“You were ahead one game,” Sara reminded them. “That’s not exactly winning.”
“I’m not playing with you again,” Annie told Mel. “If we play tomorrow, I’ll be Sara’s partner. Or Lola’s.”
“That’s assuming we can find Lola.”
“Is it my imagination,” Mel asked, “or does Lola seem a bit more addled than usual?”
“More addled,” Sara said.
“Definitely more addled,” Annie said. “She was fine until Briggs called.”
Mel stared ahead at the shadowy path threading its way between the courts. “If Briggs calls again, let me talk to him.”
“Maybe I should just unplug the phone,” Annie said.
“No, don’t do that,” Sara said. “There might be an emergency.”
Mel said, “I think she’s taking something. I think she’s heavily medicated.”
Sara shook her head. “We don’t know that. Besides …” she began, and stopped.
“Besides what?” Mel asked.
“Nothing.”
Annie swung her bag over her shoulder. “But how do we know if she’s taking pills?”
“Easy,” Mel said, starting up the path ahead of them. “We ask her.”
Lola was up in the clubhouse, trying on a tennis skirt. When they came through the double glass doors, she was standing in front of a three-sided mirror, turning back and forth. She seemed surprised to see them. “What do you think?” she asked, smoothing the tennis skirt with her hands. “Isn’t it adorable?”
Mel let her tennis bag slide to her feet. She turned around and walked a few paces, stopping beside a rack of shirts and staring fixedly out the plate-glass window. Sara said patiently, “Lola, we’ve been waiting for you.”
Lola’s eyes widened. “You have?”
“Yes. For nearly an hour.”
“We were right in the middle of a set,” Annie reminded her. “Did you forget?”
From the checkout counter, the salesclerk watched them curiously.
Lola stared at herself in the glass. “You were waiting for me?”
“Don’t you remember?”
She studied her reflection intently. She nodded slightly. “Yes,” she said. “I think I do.” Her eyes clouded for a moment but then brightened again. She twirled around on her toes like a ballerina. “What do you think?” she asked, indicating the skirt.
“We were right in the middle of a game,” Annie said. “You and Sara against me and Mel.”
“That’s right,” Lola said, nodding her head emphatically. “Now I remember.”
“You went to take a potty break.”
Lola smiled brightly at them in the glass. “I remember,” she said. “Sorry.”
Mel turned around and came back. She leaned in close to Lola, and in a low, fierce voice asked, “Lola, are you taking anything? Pills. I’m talking about pills.”
Lola stared at her with a vacant expression. She plucked at the skirt. “This is on sale,” she said.
“That’s right,” the girl at the counter said brightly. “Fifty percent off. Everything in the store.”
“Thank you!” Mel said, rounding on the clerk. “We’re just looking, okay?” She tugged Lola’s arm, pulling her into the back of the store. Sara and Annie followed.
“Let’s take her back to the house to interrogate her,” Sara said uneasily.
“Good idea.”
They watched as Lola, seemingly unconcerned by the conversation, went over and began to pick through a basket of tennis panties. “Whatever has happened, I blame Briggs,” Sara said.
“No one’s disputing that,” Mel said heavily.
“You were the one who wanted her to marry that asshole.”
Mel gave her a steady look. “I don’t recall telling anyone who they should marry.”
“You have a short memory then.”
Annie stepped between them. “Let’s not do this here,” she said.
Chapter 26
nnie and Mitchell were married the September after she graduated from Bedford. She had spent the summer numbly planning her wedding, going through the dreary details like a robot. The ceremony was held at the Harvest Hollow Baptist Church in Nashville. Sara flew in from Charlotte and Mel flew in from New York for the occasion. They were Annie’s bridesmaids. Lola was still on her three-month honeymoon, being held hostage by Briggs in Europe, so she wasn’t able to come, although she did send a telegram from Dublin, along with a large bouquet of white lilies that managed to look, in Annie’s eyes anyway, somewhat funereal.
Annie’s new in-laws, Preston and Gladys, had given the newlyweds a week in Gatlinburg, Tennessee as a wedding present. They were simple country folk and saw no reason why a young couple would want to honeymoon in a place that offered more extravagant diversions than Hillbilly Golf or the world-famous Christus Gardens. The gardens featured life-size dioramas from the Life of Christ including, among others, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Angel at the Tomb. Mitchell was particularly enamored of an ancient coin collection on display that featured the Shekel of Tyre, thought to have been among the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. Annie followed him bleakly around the gardens, trying to ignore the piercing blue-eyed stare of the many lifelike Jesuses. Her guilt would later become a small thing, a tiny festering sore covered by layer upon layer of scar tissue. But in those early days of their marriage her guilt was a gaping rawedged wound that bled through the bandages when she least expected it: as she said her vows to Mitchell at the altar, as she listened while Mitchell shyly introduced her as my bride, as she watched while Mitchell, tearyeyed, knelt at the feet of a lifelike Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Unable to stomach another day, Annie, pleading a headache, sent Mitchell off to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum by himself. She lay on the round, crushed-velvet bed staring up at her sullen reflection in the ceiling mirror and listening as his cheerful whistle died slowly along the corridor. Over in the corner, the heart-shaped hot tub bubbled like a cauldron.
She couldn
’t go on like this. She couldn’t go on living like an empty shell, a husk, a snakeskin, frail and papery on a sun-warmed rock. She had to get hold of herself. What can’t be cured must be endured, her mother liked to say. She was a fountain of good advice these days. It’ll hurt a little bit the first time, her mother had warned her about her wedding night (not knowing that Annie and Mitchell had been intimate for years). But after that, you’ll get used to it. (As if getting used to it was the best she could hope for.) It’s a sacred union, blessed by God, she had continued, before Annie cut her off with a curt motion of her hand. She had wanted to tell her mother that she was no virgin, not by a long shot, but she bit her lip and kept quiet. If her mother had noticed anything strange in Annie’s behavior leading up to the ceremony, she had, like Mitchell, put it down to pre-wedding jitters.
Annie sighed and rolled over, facing the windows. The drapes were open, and in the blue sky beyond the window the clouds stood in ridges, like rows of carded wool. She imagined the same bright sky stretching above Bedford. She wondered what Paul Ballard was doing now. She imagined him hurrying across the leaf-strewn campus on his way to class, whistling an aria from Tosca, his satchel swinging lightly as he walked.
Annie pulled the crushed-velvet covers over her head so she wouldn’t have to look at her reflection in the mirror. The acts that had occurred in this gaudy room had less to do with a sacred union and more to do with a Juarez brothel, Annie thought dejectedly. The only thing missing was a trapeze, and Mitchell would have no doubt booked them into the Trapeze Room if it had been available.
Annie had shut her mind to what she was doing and followed his instructions obediently. Do this, put that here, roll over; she’d meekly done as she was told until he’d finally said in exasperation, “Damn, honey, could you show a little enthusiasm?”
